Nintendo Wins a $4.5 Million Default Judgment Against Switch Piracy Reddit Mod Archbox, and Collecting Looks Unlikely

Nintendo just collected the biggest paper win it could have asked for against a man who called himself a pirate on Reddit. A US federal judge granted the company a default judgment of $4.5 million (about 3.4 million pounds) against James C. Williams, better known as Archbox, the former lead moderator of r/SwitchPirates. Eurogamer and TorrentFreak both report that Williams never answered the lawsuit, which Nintendo filed in June 2024. The court gave Nintendo everything it requested, including a permanent injunction. The catch is that the shops Nintendo went after are long gone, and getting a cent out of an unresponsive defendant will be a very different fight.

What the court actually ordered

U.S. District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo's motion in full this week. Nintendo asked for the statutory maximum of $150,000 for each of 30 games, and the judge agreed, which is where the $4.5 million comes from. The named titles include The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the exact kind of evergreen Switch bestsellers pirate shops love to stock. King wrote that Williams' "egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here," which is not the tone of a judge looking for a middle ground. She also noted that at roughly $50 a game, lost sales could easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, so the maximum award was "not an unrealistic estimate" of Nintendo's actual damages.

The injunction is broader than the 30 named games. Williams is barred from distributing any pirated Nintendo game, not just the ones in the complaint, along with any software that circumvents protections on Nintendo games and consoles. He also cannot encourage anyone else to download pirated games or circumvention tools. The order requires him to disable his pirate shops and the accounts used to run or promote them, covering Reddit, Instagram, X, TikTok, Discord and Telegram. Nintendo also skipped DMCA damages and attorneys' fees, and the judge called that a "gesture of reasonableness" that supported handing over the maximum copyright damages.

How Archbox dug his own hole

Nintendo accused Williams, an Arizona resident, of facilitating a network of unauthorized shops that offered big libraries of pirated Switch games for download. According to the complaint, he promoted those shops on the SwitchPirates subreddit, helped users install circumvention software, and asked for eShop gift card donations to buy games that were then decrypted and added to the shops. Williams never responded to the complaint, so Nintendo asked for a default judgment last October. The judge stressed that he clearly knew about the case, because he hired a lawyer to object to a Google subpoena and still failed to answer the lawsuit itself. That is a strange strategy, and it left the court with nothing but Nintendo's version of events.

His own posts did the rest of the damage. The order cites Reddit comments in which Williams calls himself a pirate and says he isn't going to give Nintendo $50 for a game, which told the judge he knew the games were copyrighted and distributed them anyway. That made the infringement willful, and willful is what turns a big number into the biggest number. If you want a lesson in why you do not narrate your own piracy operation under a public username, this is it. Nintendo's legal team gets plenty of stick, but a moderator bragging about not paying $50 hands them the case.

A win on paper, and not much else

Here is the part that matters for anyone tempted to read this as a new precedent. Because Williams did not respond, the court took the allegations in the complaint as true, so none of Nintendo's legal claims were actually tested. It is an uncontested win, not a ruling that sets out how a court would treat a fought case. The practical results are also thin. The archbox Reddit account has already been self-deleted, and the shops named in the complaint were shut down long ago, most of them after Nintendo sent a cease and desist letter in March 2024. TorrentFreak says recouping the $4.5 million will likely be hard, particularly since the defendant is unresponsive.

This fits a pattern in how Nintendo handles piracy. Eurogamer points out that the company already put Switch pirate Gary Bowser behind bars and went after the Yuzu emulator until its creator agreed to pay Nintendo a settlement. A parallel Nintendo lawsuit against Modded Hardware was filed the same day as this one and ended last year when its operator agreed to a $2 million judgment to settle. Nintendo files where it can win big and lets the headline number do the deterrent work. Whether Williams ever pays is almost beside the point, because the message to every other shop operator and forum mod is written in seven figures.

What the community is saying

Reaction is limited so far. Most of what showed up on X was outlets and aggregators relaying the headline in English, Spanish, German and Chinese, with very little independent commentary yet. The one substantive take we found came from a user who admitted Nintendo's legal team can be over the top but argued that you have to side with the company here because Archbox is an idiot. That is a single voice, so we are not going to pretend it is a consensus. Given how divisive Nintendo's enforcement has been over the years, expect louder opinions once the story spreads beyond gaming legal news.

The CriticalPixel take

Nobody should shed tears for a man who ran shops full of pirated Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Kart copies and bragged about it on Reddit. The judgment is still a bit of theater. Nintendo asked for the statutory maximum on all 30 games, got it because the defendant did not show up, and now holds a $4.5 million number attached to someone who has already erased his footprint. The real deterrent is not the money but the fact that a moderator with a public username ended up in federal court with a permanent injunction. If Nintendo wants piracy to shrink rather than just relocate, the $50 games Williams refused to buy are the other half of the story, and that price point is still the argument pirates make.

For now, the practical takeaway is simple. The shops are dead, the account is deleted, and the court order says Williams cannot distribute Nintendo games or circumvention tools anywhere. Whether Nintendo ever sees a dollar is a question for later, and the smart money says it will not see much. We will keep an eye out for any follow-up filings, but do not expect this one to change how the piracy scene operates.

Sources

Eurogamer: US court orders Redditor to pay Nintendo 3.4m pounds over Switch piracy

TorrentFreak: Nintendo Wins $4.5 Million Judgment Against r/SwitchPirates Mod Archbox

Nintendo: The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom official store page